She had spotted him before she was even all the way through the door of the club and immediately turned and walked out. She started running when she heard him scrambling behind her and the chase was on.
Now, in the privacy of her apartment, she collapsed on her thirty-dollar thrift shop couch—tastefully upholstered in puke orange—and relived the chase. Carlotti was big but fast—and driven. If fear had been the fuel for her legs, hatred was his.
Screw up one lousy drug shipment for the guy by siccing the Man on him, she thought morosely, and that was five years ago! And he’s still holding a grudge, still wants to kill me. Guy’s watched a few too many Godfather movies.
That was Carlotti’s problem—one of his problems, anyway. He fancied himself a Corleone, when in reality he was a Clouseau. Everyone on the wrong side of the law knew the mob wasn’t the all-seeing, vengeance-taking organization depicted in the movies. And as for “organized crime”—ha! It wasn’t organized at all. A few groups of loosely connected dealers, that was all. Sometimes they were successful in contracting crime to the local talent. Most times, not.
These days, the mob was a lot more interested in legitimate business—video arcades, karaoke bars, beauty salons. It was absolutely ridiculous how much a thriving salon could make in a fiscal year, especially if they also handled manicures. Lucrative and infinitely less dangerous than, say, running hookers.
Only the real idiots stayed in the drug trade, she knew. Too much heat, the feds had no tolerance for it, and the fall was long if you got pinched. Carlotti, of course, was a real idiot, and thus he fancied himself a mob drug lord. And, as a faithful disciple of mob movie fiction, he was still after her. As he’d proved tonight.
Shivering a little, she got up off the couch and headed for her mini bathroom. No shower, a cracked tub, and a rust-stained sink—the room was so small, when she sat on the toilet her knees touched the wall. It didn’t matter. It was hers and she liked to think of it as a snug fox den, a haven from predators.
She sat down on the rim of the tub and started to fill it with warm water—after tonight, she needed to get Carlotti’s stink off her—and thought about the idiot. She’d run for the hospital, naively thinking he wouldn’t follow her to a well-lit, populated building. She hadn’t counted on how deserted a hospital would be at three A.M. He’d finally cornered her and found out that a thief was never more dangerous than when her back was to the wall.
And the doctor who had seen everything—what was that about? He’d watched her, tried to warn her, and she could still feel the heat of his dark gaze. If she closed her eyes she could still see him—so broad-shouldered he nearly filled the doorway, with a lush mop of dark hair and the blackest eyes, strong, long-fingered hands, and a grin like lightning, a grin that lit up his whole face.
He’d chased her, but, to her surprise, not to hurt her or turn her in. To ask if she was all right. To ask if she needed a safe place to stay. She must have stared at him for an hour, or so it seemed. Who knows what she might have said—or done—if security hadn’t shown up. His gaze had been so curiously intense and his smile, this marvelous charming smile …
A sudden thought made her straighten up so quickly she nearly tumbled into the tub. The doctor had seen Carlotti. And could testify against him. If the D.A. found out, he’d subpoena the doc in a nanosecond. The doc couldn’t testify to much of anything, but anything was a start—didn’t Capone go down for tax evasion? The D.A. would be glad to get Carlotti on trespassing and attempted assault, if only so that he could introduce his suspicions to a judge.
If word got out that there was one eyewitness, others would certainly follow … the D.A. could build a case from whispers. God knew they did it all the time. And Carlotti’s worst fear was doing time. When he was thirteen, he’d killed a witness to his shoplifting, just to avoid being shipped back to juvie.
The doctor was in very real danger. Carlotti had to shut him up, the sooner the better. The psycho wouldn’t have to worry about her—the D.A. was at least as interested in putting her behind bars as he was in Carlotti—but he had to worry about the doctor. He probably had thugs working on the problem already.
“Crap,” she sighed, and got up to make the first of several cups of coffee.
Chapter 2
The next night, Jared was still thinking about the woman and still mentally yelling at himself to forget about her. You’ll never see her again, he told himself, followed by, Also, the whole thing was probably a hallucination brought on by too much paperwork. Proof that spending too much time on chart work is bad for you. Trouble was, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Even now, when he was supposed to be snoozing in the third-floor on-call room, he was tossing and turning on the narrow, smelly bunk, fantasizing about what’s-her-name instead of getting the sleep he needed. And the first rule of internship and residency was to sleep whenever you could. Sleep standing up if you had to.
He’d asked around, but no one knew of a beautiful blond goddess who ran like a deer and punched like a middleweight champion. Some of the nurses had suggested it was time he started dating again. One of the orderlies told him once he got more sleep, the hallucinations would stop. That was the trouble with being the hospital wiseass … when you had a serious problem, no one believed it.
Tap-tap.
Hell, it wasn’t like he was hard up for female companionship. He worked with at least ten female docs and three times that many nurses. Not to mention X-ray techs, the lab ladies, the social workers—heck, wasn’t the hospital chaplain a woman? One of the benefits of being an ER doc was that he got to visit all the wards, got to meet all the—
Tap-tap.
—staff outside his department and he should just—
Tap-tap-tap.
“What the hell is that?” he muttered, getting up and crossing the room. He had a flashback to one of his literature classes. “Who is that tapping, tapping at my chamber door?” he boomed, pulling back the curtain and expecting to see … he wasn’t sure. A branch, rasping across the glass? A pigeon? Instead, he found himself gazing into a face ten inches from his own. “Aaiiggh!”
It was her. Crouched on the ledge, perfectly balanced on the balls of her feet, she had one small fist raised, doubtless ready to knock again. When she saw him, she gestured patiently to the lock. He dimly noticed she was dressed like a normal person instead of a burglar—navy leggings and a matching turtleneck—and wondered why she wasn’t shivering with cold.
He groped for the latch, dry-mouthed with fear for her. They were three stories up! If she should lose her balance … if a gust of wind should come up … The latch finally yielded to his fumbling fingers and he wrenched the window open, grabbing for her. She leaned back, out of the reach of his arms, and his heart stopped—actually stopped, ka-THUD!—in his chest. He backpedaled away from the window. “Okay, okay, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you, now would you please get your ass in here?”
She raised her eyebrows at him and complied, swinging one leg over the ledge and stepping down into the room as lightly as a ballerina. He collapsed on the cot, clutching his chest. “Could you please not ever ever do that again?” he gasped. “Christ! My heart! What’s going on? How’d you get up there? Did the nurses lock all the entrances again? They do that when they’re overworked—”
“‘Quoth the Raven, nevermore’,” she said, and helped herself to a cup of coffee from the pot set up next to the window. At his surprised gape, she smiled a little and tapped her ear. “Thin glass. I heard you through the window. ‘While I pondered, nearly napping, suddenly there came a rapping, rapping at my chamber door.’ I think that’s how it goes. Poe was high most of the time, so it’s hard to tell. Also, the man you saw me bludgeon into unconsciousness dropped a dime on you today.”
“He what?”
“Dropped a dime. Rolled you over. Put you out. Phoned you in. Wants to clock you. Wants to drop you. Made arrangements to have you killed, pronto. Sugar?”
“No thanks,” he said numbl
y.
“I mean,” she said patiently, “is there sugar?”
He pointed to the last locker on the left and thought to warn her too late. When she opened it (first wrapping her sleeve around her hand, he noticed, as she had with the coffee pot handle), several hundred tea bags, salt packets, and sugar cubes tumbled out, free of their overstuffed, poorly stacked boxes. She quickly stepped back, avoiding the rain of sweetener, then bent, picked a cube off the floor, blew on it, and dropped it into her cup. She shoved the locker door with her knee until it grudgingly shut, trapping a dozen or so tea bags and sugar packets in the bottom with a grinding sound that set his teeth on edge.
She went to the door, thumbed the lock with her sleeve, then came back and sat down at the rickety table opposite the cot. She took a tentative sip of her coffee and then another, not so tentative. He was impressed—the hospital coffee tasted like primeval mud, as it boiled and reboiled all day and night. “So that’s the scoop,” she said casually.
“You’re here to kill me?” he asked, trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the last forty seconds. “You’re the hitman? Hitperson?” Who knocked for entry? he added silently.
“Me? Do wet work?” She threw her head back and pealed laughter at the ceiling. She had, he noticed admiringly, a great laugh. Her hair was plaited in a long blond braid that reached halfway down her back. He wondered what it would look like unbound and spread across his pillow. “Oh, that’s very funny, Dr. Dean.”
“Thanks, I’ve got a million of ’em.” Pause. “How did you know my name?”
She smiled. It was a nice smile, warm, with no condescension. “It wasn’t hard to find out.”
“What’s your name?” he asked boldly. He should have been nervous about the locked door, about the threat to his life. He wasn’t. Instead, he was delighted at the chance to talk to her, after a day of thinking about her and wondering how she was—who she was.
“Kara.”
“That’s gorgeous,” he informed her, “and I, of course, am not surprised. You’re so pretty! And so deadly,” he added with relish, “you’re like one of those flowers that people can’t resist picking and then—bam! Big-time rash.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I think.” She blushed, which gave her high color and made her eyes bluer. He stared, besotted. He didn’t think women blushed anymore. He didn’t think women who beat up thugs blushed at all. He was very much afraid his mouth was hanging open, and he was unable to do a thing about it. “Dr. Dean—”
“Umm?”
“—I’m not sure you understand the seriousness of the situation.”
“Long, tall, and ugly is out to get me,” he said, sitting down opposite her. He shoved a pile of charts aside; several clattered to the floor and she watched them fall, amused. “But since you’re not the hitman, I’m not too worried.”
“Actually, I’m your self-appointed bodyguard.”
“Oh, well, then I’m not worried at all,” he said with feigned carelessness, while his brain chewed that one—bodyguard?—over.
“You could take on an assassin with one hand while writing a grocery list with the other. You’re certainly a match for whoever that guy sends after me. So, do I pay you? Should we even be talking about money? What’s the etiquette here?”
She blinked. “Uh … that won’t be necessary. Dr. Dean—”
“Jared.”
“—may I say, you’re taking this remarkably well?”
“Work in an ER for a year,” he said, suddenly grim. “You learn to recover your equilibrium pretty damned quickly.”
“Touché,” she said quietly.
“So now what?”
“Now you don’t get killed.”
“I mean, what happens now? What do we do?”
“We?”
“We’ve got to sic the cops on the bad guy, right? Do we, er, drop a dime on him?”
“No cops!” she yelped, startling him. She hadn’t been this rattled when Uggo had been trying to smash her face in. “We’ll keep you out of trouble until this blows over. End of plan.”
“Blows over?” he practically shouted. “I have to—we have to put our lives on hold until ole One Eyebrow goes away? Forgive me, but I thought you were a little more pro-active than that.”
“You’re right,” she admitted, “but when the law is involved, I can’t be as pro-active as I’d like.”
“But … aren’t you in trouble, too? Won’t Jerk-off try to kill you?”
“Oh, he’s been trying,” she said casually, as if a large, frightening, ugly man trying to kill her was of as much consequence as a threatened spring shower. “For years. He’ll never get me. Too dumb. Too slow.”
“Too lame a bad guy, sounds like,” he muttered. “It’s almost embarrassing to be on his shit list.”
She frowned. “This is serious. You’re a sitting duck because you’re different.”
“You mean because I have two eyebrows?”
She giggled into her cup and he was absurdly pleased with himself. “I mean, you’re a citizen. A taxpayer, one of the good guys. Not like Carlotti.”
He pounced. “Not like you?”
The smile vanished, poof! “You ask a lot of questions, Dr. Dean.”
“Jared. And you’re still in trouble with this guy, same as I am. Who’s going to look out for you? I mean, if you get sick or short of breath or have chest pains, I’m your man, but if a hit squad starts shooting at you to shut you up, I’ll be the one cowering in the corner with my hands over my ears.”
She smiled and tried to hide it, but he saw it and grinned back at her. “Carlotti knows he has nothing to fear from me in court,” she explained, getting up to refill her cup. She disdained the sugar locker and drank it black, making an appreciative face. He couldn’t believe it—of all the things to happen this evening, beautiful Kara enjoying the hospital’s interpretation of coffee was the strangest. “I can’t testify against him.”
She didn’t elaborate, but Jared was able to figure that one out. There were only two reasons not to testify against anyone: fear—which Kara didn’t seem to know the meaning of—and having something to hide. You didn’t testify for the D.A. if the D.A. had something on you as well.
He wondered what she had done.
“So let’s go see the D.A.,” he said, seizing the bull by the horns.
“You may, if you like,” she said quietly, “but you’ll go alone and I would prefer to wait and see what happens.”
Which meant she knew a lot more than she was telling. He had the feeling that if he insisted on seeing the D.A., he’d for a fact never see her again.
He instantly decided that was an unacceptable course of action. Screw the risk to his personal health! He had to get to know this woman.
“So … what?”
“We wait until Carlotti is arrested. It shouldn’t be long. A lot of people are looking for him.” She said that with cool relish and he made a mental note to never get on her bad side. “When he’s arrested, you’re out of danger.”
“Doesn’t he have hench-thugs who could still get me?”
She nodded. “In theory. But they won’t make a move without him breathing in their ears. You can see the D.A.—his name is Thomas Wechter, by the way, second floor of the courthouse, take a left past the water fountain—and tell him your story, tell him you’re willing to testify, ask to see the rest of his case. If he has one.”
“What about you?” he asked, trying once again, even though he knew it was useless. The same tenacity that made other doctors literally pull him off a DOA wouldn’t let him back away from this. “You were wronged by Carstupidi. You should testify that he tried to kill you! I mean, Jesus, that big bully, if you hadn’t cleaned his clock, I would have.”
She snorted and he raised an eyebrow at her. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I was just picturing you and Carlotti—but you were talking about the D.A. I can’t testify. It’s all up to you.”
“What are you afraid of?” he asked bo
ldly, sure she’d rebuff him, or deny fear. Instead, she just gave him a level look.
“Nothing I could explain to you,” she said quietly, then got up, poured the rest of her coffee down the sink and walked to the window. She took the cup with her, he noticed. After a moment, he got it—she was so paranoid, she wouldn’t take a chance on leaving fingerprints behind. Interesting. “See you around, Dr. Dean. I’ll be in touch.” She stepped up to the windowsill.
“It’s Jared,” he yelled, darting after her, “and use the door, for God’s sake! Look, it’s right here.” He rattled the doorknob invitingly; she ignored him. “I can walk you to the main entrance. Ha! Some bodyguard!” he screamed and that got her attention; she paused and turned, looking at him over her shoulder, one foot already on the ledge. “Leaving me here to rot! I’m easy pickings for Carlotti’s hench-morons.”
She smiled. “Hardly. I’ll be close. Good night.” “Wait!” But the window closed firmly and when he darted to it to look out, it was so dark he couldn’t see her anymore.
Ten hours later, he let himself into his apartment. A long shift, but a busy and rewarding one—only one death and that one a DNR, an eighty-seven-year-old woman who had been praying for death for the better part of a year, according to her calmly tearful daughter. Tough, but it could have been so much worse. Was so much worse, frequently.
He often wondered how he had ended up where he was—a physician, someone who dealt with death every day. In school he’d been an amiable goof-off, the class clown, never taking anything or anyone seriously. Strange that he had been drawn to a career that was, at times, absolutely the furthest thing from humorous.
It wasn’t that he’d lost someone close to him, had been marked forever by the death of a parent or close friend. Hell, he’d never had so much as a pet die on him. But in college he’d taken an EMT course, and as part of the training he had to volunteer at a busy metro hospital.
Looking at the suffering around him, he watched the doctors and nurses ease that suffering, pull off miracle cures, reunite families. He remembered thinking, That looks a helluva lot more satisfying than working in an office or going out to L.A. to do stand-up. Making people laugh is one thing. Giving them their lives back is another. He had gone home that night and applied to five premed programs. His father, seeing his slack-ass son filling out college applications instead of watching Friends reruns, had nearly wept with relief.
Doing It Right Page 2
